Now that I’ve been in Japan for a little while, I’ve started noticing how being away from home changes the way I see myself and my habits. Ironically, even though I attended Arkansas Tech University, I only lived on campus during my first two years of college. During that time, I stayed only in private-suite style rooms. While this gave me the privacy, I felt I needed, it also limited my interactions with other people and roommates. When I started planning my exchange trip to Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, I realized that for the first time since my sophomore year of college, I would have to live in a dorm again. One of my original goals for this experience was to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds and learn positive things from them. This goal strongly influenced my decision to live at International House (I-House) (Picture of I-House).
I-House is the most social exchange student dormitory, offering a main common area, shared kitchens, shared tatami rooms (Picture of a Tatami Room), and an outside socializing area. Over my stay at I-House so far, some games have become staples of the common room: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Guitar Hero. At first, we would play BO2 whenever we had free time. For example, if we wanted to go to Sakae (栄) or Fujigaoka (藤が丘) and the next bus was not arriving soon, we would just play BO2 to pass the time.
Recently, Guitar Hero has become the most popular game. The game uses a guitar-shaped controller where players match music patterns from real songs. Originally, I was terrible at it, but over the past few weeks, I became surprisingly skilled. While learning Guitar Hero, I also started reflecting on the fact that I no longer had any real hobbies. College life, preparing for graduation, searching for a job, and planning for my exchange trip had consumed most of my time and energy.
The separation from my friends, family, school, and normal routine revealed that I lacked creative and enjoyable ways to spend my free time. In the past, most of my free time was spent doom scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. Because of this realization, I made one of the best purchases I have made in a long time: a real electric guitar (Picture of my electric guitar or me playing it). When I was younger, I took guitar lessons at my Boys and Girls Club, and now that I have more free time and a healthier environment to grow in, learning guitar again feels like the perfect outlet.
I also decided to continue my language-learning interests by starting to learn Spanish again. Although I only took one semester of Spanish in high school, I grew up around many Spanish-speaking friends and classmates, which made me want to reconnect with the language. Since Spanish is more like English than Japanese is, I should be able to spend less time learning and still learn at the same pace. This would make me trilingual which is something that I never thought I would be before, but now it’s a goal that I am striving for.
